Some suggestions for the usermanager

[Martin Bammer]

Hi,
 
I was playing around with extending and fixing some bugs in the usermanager. One
of the bugs I would like to get fixed is setting the avatar for users.
As I've seen in the code changing the avatar does not check for which user the
avatar was changed. It always changes the avatar of the currently logged in
user. Fixing this would mean either disable the possibility to change other
user's avatar in the GUI (the easier solution) or to take care which user's
avatars were changed and write the temporary files to the correct destination.
As long as the home directories are not encrypted this could be done with root
rights. In case of encrypted homes every user, which avatar was changed, would
have to enter his password after clicking the Apply button. Not a nice solution.

In addition the avatar is not set for the login manager. As I've seen in the
sources SDDM is just ignoring the avatars in the folder
/var/lib/AccountsService/icons. So adding this search folder as the primary
source would be a good idea. Then it does not matter if the homes are encrypted
or not.
 
Some additional features I would like to have:
- Selecting user's groups, like it is possible in Mint.
- An option to show the home's encryption key. Currently the user has exactly 1
chance to write down his encryption key. Later he has to google how this can be
done and has to use the command line for this. Not user friendly.
- An option to easily enable/disable home's encryption. Currently only the first
user who installs the system can enable the encryption for him in the installer.
But for every new user who want to have an encrypted home the command line is
needed.
- Maybe also an option to choose the user-id and group-id for new users. The
current implementation has IMHO a design problem: The first user gets id 1000
(on Debian based systems, on RedHat based systems 500). The second 1001 and so
on. But what if we have a small home network where everyone has it's own
machine, thus different users have the same id? Problems arise when sharing with
NFS or when using external drives with a Linux FS. My suggestion would be to
calculate hash values out of the user and group names to get the ids. Not
perfect, but much better than the current implementation. But this is a topic
for the base system and not for the usermanager.
Here a screenshot how this could look like:

 
Your suggestions are very welcome.
 
Best regards,
 
Martin Bammer
 
 
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